Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts

In Rising Titans, Falling Giants Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson focuses on the policies that rising states adopt toward their declining competitors in response to declining states’ policies, and what that means for the relationship between the two.

Rising Titans, Falling Giants integrates disparate approaches to realism into a single theoretical framework, provides new insight into the sources of cooperation and competition in international relations, and offers a new empirical treatment of great power politics at the start and end of the Cold War. Shifrinson challenges the existing historical interpretations of diplomatic history, particularly in terms of the United States-China relationship. Whereas many analysts argue that these two nations are on a collision course, Shifrinson declares instead that rising states often avoid antagonizing those in decline, and highlights episodes that suggest the US-China relationship may prove to be far less conflict-prone than we might expect.